By JAMES BROOKE

Published: July 11, 1996

BIROBIDZHAN, Russia—
The capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region does not have a synagogue.

Rusting Hebrew letters totter precariously above the railroad station, an impressive hall built by forced labor in the 1930's to welcome Jewish colonists from Argentina, Europe, and the United States. But with only 1.5 percent of the region's 220,000 people now identifying themselves as Jewish, it is clear that Stalin's vision of creating a Soviet Palestine sank long ago into this wilderness of swamps and forests bordering Manchuria.

There is no synagogue, and there will be no synagogue," Lena Belyayeva, a Yiddish teacher, said gloomily as she walked down Sholem Aleichem Street in this small city, a provincial mix of tree-shaded streets, gingerbread-style log cabins, and state buildings in the early Communist style.

Intended to answer "the Jewish question" in 1928, events in this remote corner of Russia have, over the ensuing decades, mirrored larger trends convulsing Jews across the Soviet Union and its successor states -- from ruthless "Russification" in the 1950's to headlong emigration in the 1990's.

Much the way thousands of Jews from elsewhere in Russia and abroad migrated here in the 1930's during the Depression, many of the remaining Jews are emigrating today from a Russian province that has seen its industrial and agricultural production fall by half since 1990. During the first five months of this year, 872 people, or about 20 percent of the region's remaining Jewish population, left on chartered Aeroflot flights for Tel Aviv.

"Apartment prices have fallen by about one-third," said David Weisserman, a local historian. "The orchestra, the writers' club, the readers' club don't exist anymore because so many people have left. If Israel would say that Russians could come, half of Birobidzhan would go."

With the Jewish population dwindling fast, local authorities in May closed the local office of the Jewish Agency, a Jerusalem-based, privately financed group that promotes emigration to Israel. The closing may be part of a wider crackdown on this agency, which maintains 19 offices across Russia. With Russian emigration to Israel running at about 75,000 people a year, Russia's Justice Ministry in April ordered agency offices to close until the group re-registers in Moscow under a new law for non-governmental organizations.

Most Jewish Agency offices in Russia are still operating, awaiting a formal decision on registration by the Justice Ministry. Local officials have only closed agency offices here and in Pyatigorsk, a southern Russian city that has received Jewish refugees from Chechnya.

"Originally, the agency was helping culture, supporting a summer camp for kids," said Aleksandra A. Gavrilova, publisher of Birobidzhaner Shtern, a Government-owned, Yiddish-language newspaper here. "But when it changed its focus to taking people to Israel, that became a problem."

Jewish emigration is often resented in Russia. Yet, in recent years, city officials here have done little to encourage Jews to stay. Two years ago, a project to build a synagogue stalled when the city gave a desired lot to a bank. Birobidzhan's original synagogue burned in a suspicious fire in 1959. But now, city officials have a reason to want Jews to stay.

"They are afraid that if all the Jews go, there will be no need for a Jewish Autonomous Region," said Miss Belyayeva, one of two Yiddish teachers here. "Without that status, they will lose special subsidies from the federal budget."

To Stalin, the idea of a Jewish region served several purposes: repaying Jewish supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution, winning international propaganda points, and using foreign donations to finance a strategic settlement. In 1931, when Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, the neighboring Jewish Autonomous Region had only 40,000 people living in an area larger than Switzerland.

Stalin's proclamation of the modern world's first Jewish political entity provoked chaotic immigration. Working in open competition with the Zionist movement encouraging Jewish migration to Palestine, Soviet officials toured Jewish communities in America, Argentina, and Germany as well as in other parts of the Soviet Union, often ending their appeals with a toast: "Next year in Birobidzhan!"

But to most Soviet Jews, a one-way rail ticket to a wilderness east of Siberia smacked of exile. Census figures show that at least two-thirds of foreign migrants gave up and left after two years here.

"It was very primitive, the outhouses were awful," Ruth Mackler, now 76 years old and living in Manhattan, said of her family's attempt to survive on a commune here in the mid-1930's. "The wolves would come out at night. And I had to figure out how to get to that outhouse before dark."

The colony, numbering about 20,000 Jews in the 1930's, gradually achieved a cultural life of its own, with Yiddish theaters and writers' clubs. But the Jewish flowering was brutally cut short when Stalin's purges reached here from Moscow, 3,500 miles to the west. In 1936 and 1937, the entire political leadership and the membership of the writers' club disappeared into labor camps.

Recovering slightly after World War II, the colony received thousands of homeless Jews and reached its peak in 1948 of around 30,000, about one-quarter of the region's population.

But Stalin's anti-Jewish purges followed in 1948, when Jewish activities were put on a par with criminal activities. The Yiddish theater was turned into a Young Communist Club and the Yiddish publishing house, literary magazine and schools were closed. Jews were barred from local government, and a new group of writers were rounded up and shot.

Since 1990, there has been a modest cultural renaissance here: a Jewish day school, two Jewish Sunday schools, a Jewish summer camp, and a Torah for the city museum.

But as Jews ventured out of the Siberian woodwork to learn about their roots, their quest invariably drew them to the flights to Tel Aviv. For those who remain, resentment carries old tinges of Russification and xenophobia.

"The agency had people from Mossad," Anatoly Rabinovich, director of the government-owned television station here, said, echoing Russian press allegations that Israeli intelligence operatives work for the private Jewish Agency. "What they were doing here was against Russia."

Photo: Jewish collective farmers are described, in this 1935 Sovietphoto, as dining in their field camp in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan. Today, the number of Jews is dwindling fast, with just 1.5 percent of the population identifying themselves as Jewish, and there is no synagogue. (Sovfoto) Map of Russia highlighting Birobidzhan: The Jewish population of Birobidzhan has been shrinking fast.